Completed after nearly 30 years of astral journeys on the Tree of Life

and occult experimentation guided with the symbolism of Aleister Crowleys
magickal system enshrined in the ‘Book of Thoth Tarot’.

Aleister Crowley as ‘Ankh-af-na-Khonsu in 1910

“…Concerning thy Travellings in thy Body of Light or Astral journeys and Visions so-called do thou lay this Wisdom to thy Heart O my Son that in this Practice whether Things Seen and Heard be Truth and Reality or whether they be Phantoms in the Mind abideth this Supreme Magical Value namely: Whereas the Direction of such Journeys is consciously willed and determined by Reason and also unconsciously willed by the true Self since without It no Invocation were possible we have here a Cooperation of Alliance between the Inner and the Outer Self and thus an Accomplishment at least partial of the Great Work…” – Aleister Crowley ‘The Book of Wisdom or Folly’

‘The Sword & the Serpent’ follows the progress of the magician (in the person of Ankh-af-na-Khonsu) as he ascends through the astral planes that correspond to the Trumps of the Tarot and communicates with the spiritual beings, the bizarre, beautiful and sometimes horrific entities that exist upon the paths, to reveal the hidden natures of powerful occult symbols.

Crossing these Paths of the Serpent is a spiritual pilgrimage for the new age taking the traveller not to a place in the world but to a place in himself where the mystery of his being is revealed piecemeal in the procession of the Passion of the Aeon of Horus.

The Tarot Trumps are central symbols in the Hermetic system of ceremonial magick and the symbols that they employ tie together a wide variety of spiritual schools into one cohesive scheme. The twenty-two Tarot Atus represent universal principals of human consciousness but even these seminal occult symbols are only a façade for the spiritual perception which they symbolize. The visions of these paths are the personal experience of those spiritual perceptions in increasingly finer and more essential steps.

In the Golden Dawn system of magick each of the twenty-two Tarot Trumps also corresponds to one of the paths representing the essential spiritual energy that is expressed by the individual paths. The nature of these paths is determined by the numbers which they connect in the intricate pattern of the tree of Life giving each path an individual yet connected interpretation and taken together they represent a holistic image of self awareness. The Golden Dawn (and later Crowley’s A. A.) presented the path of initiation as the incremental progress from the bottom number on the Tree of Life to the completion of the Great Work in the Unity of the Crown. This made the importance of the paths in the process of initiation patently obvious and the Golden Dawn Novice level initiations concentrated on making symbolic crossings of these paths to invoke the level of self awareness that they represent.

The journeys collectively represent the entire path of initiation into the mysteries of Hermetic Magick and the secrets of the Sepher Yetzirah (the ancient ‘Book of Formation’) perhaps the most important and influential text of early kabbalah.

a ka duatuf ur biubi a’a chefududu nur af an nuteru

“O High One!
May he be praised!
The one great of Power!
The Spirit great of Dignity,
Who places fear of himself among the gods!”

The ‘Stele of Revealing’ venerated by Aleister Crowley as the priest Ankh-af-na-Khonsu

The late
David Mattichak author of ‘PYRAMIDOS: Self Initiation in the Aeon of Horus’ (Published by Hell Fire Club Books)

David Mattichak was born in 1963 in Syracuse New York and passed away on the 26th January 2015 after a courageous battle with cancer. David immigrated to Melbourne Australia with his family in 1972. He was educated Melbourne’s Essendon Grammar School before studying art at Preston College.

David had been a student of the occult arts since the early 1980s and became well known in Australian magickal circles and, in recent years, around the world due to a string of essays on a variety of occult subjects . He discovered a “key to the order & value of the English alphabet” from Aleister Crowley’s Book of the Law in 1983 and has since used this English Qabalah to unlock the secrets of Thelemite magick, and until recently he has been passing on his knowledge to private students, many of whom have gone on to become notable occultists in their own right.

After almost three decades of study and development David Mattichak was able to distil his knowledge of magick and Thelema into a manuscript, his own ’Comment on the Verses of the Book of the Law’, the first in a planned series of books on Hermeticism and Thelemite magick, revealing, for the first time in over a century, the secrets of magick that have been hidden in Crowley’s magnum opus, the Book of the Law.

David is perhaps best known for his remarkable ‘PYRAMIDOS: Self Initiation in the Aeon of Horus’, a detailed and original work of over 400 pages on the origins and development of Aleister Crowleys ‘Liber 671 vel Pyramidos’, the main ritual weapon in the armoury of any true magician.
David was an exceptionally kind and gifted man, artistically and musically inclined he also excelled as a sportsman, a chef and married a career as a writer with his magickal and mystical studies.

During the publication of his major work ‘Pyramidos: Self Initiation in the Aeon of Horus’ he was suffering an aggressive cancer but still managed to find the time both to teach his own students and to finish editing his book. Shortly after we delivered the first finely bound copy of ‘Pyramidos’ to David, he succumbed to his illness and on the 26th January 2015 he quietly passed away.